CPSE's Faculty Advisor Lisa G. Materson is professor of US women’s and gender history at the University of California, Davis, and a specialist in US women's political history. Professor Materson's research focuses on women’s involvement in social and political justice movements in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She uses intersectional frameworks to study how ideas about women and gender shaped diverse political strategies and forms of resistance in the US past. ​

Professor Materson's new book Radical Solidarity: Ruth Reynolds, Political Allyship, and the Battle for Puerto Rico’s Independence  will appear with the University of North Carolina Press in December 2024.  Materson is also the author of For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (UNC Press, 2009; paperback, 2013), which analyzes African American women’s turn to the party system at the local and national levels to undermine institutionalized segregation and disfranchisement during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is coeditor, with Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, of ​​The Oxford Handbook in American Women's and Gender History (OUP, 2018), and the author articles on Puerto Rican women's independence activism and African American women's internationalism.